The IGFAE PhD student representatives organise on Wednesday, December 13 the first-ever welcome event for arriving PhD and postdoc students.

All PhD and postdoc students at IGFAE are welcome to attend, but we especially encourage those who arrived over the past few months to do so. The event will consist of an introduction by some of the IGFAE personnel and will be followed up by some appetizers over at the Physics building.

The event will be starting around 11:30 at Aula B, and the schedule will roughly look as follows:

11:30 - Introduction by Carlos Salgado and the rest of the IGFAE management

12:00 - Brief introduction by Héctor Álvarez of the PhD program

12:20 - Brief comments by the PhD representatives

12:40 - Q&A

13:15 - Appetizers at the Physics building

One of the defining features of Quantum Chromodynamics is confinement, which prevents isolated quarks and gluons from being observed. Partons are bound within a rich spectrum of hadrons, which have various quark content, binding energy, and size. With precision vertexing, full particle ID, and a fast DAQ, the LHCb detector is uniquely well suited for measurements of a wide range of conventional and exotic hadrons. I will present recent LHCb results on mesons, baryons, and tetraquarks that are sensitive to the mechanisms enforcing confinement. In particular, I will show how these mechanisms are affected by the hadronic environment, and discuss our understanding of hadronization in a hadronic medium.

Matt Durham is Senior Researcher in the High Energy Nuclear Physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Moreover, he is convener of the Ions and Fixed Target (IFT) working group at the LHCb experiment at CERN. He was very involved in the X (3872) structure analysis PRL 126 (2021) 092001 and b-quark hadronization measurements Phys. Rev. Lett. 131, 061901.

The experimental violation of Bell inequalities implies that at least one of three assumptions, measurement independence (MI), parameter independence (PI), and outcome independence (OI), fails in nature; "one of these three premises must be false, and it is important to locate which one is false" (Shimony,1990). It is believed, however, that no experiment can decide which is the false one. Here we show that this is not true.

(Organized by IGFAE, Quantum Spain & CESGA)

Author: Marcos González Martínez.

Title: Jet quenching for measuring the QCD collectivity temporal structure.

Supervisors: Carlota Andrés Casas, Carlos Salgado López.

Nesta sétima edición de Ciencia Singular o CiQUS, CiMUS, CiTIUS e IGFAE abrirán as súas portas á cidadanía unha vez máis para celebrar o seu meirande encontro de divulgación anual, que convida a familias e visitantes de tódalas idades a achegarse á investigación de excelencia desenvolvida no ecosistema científico da Rede de Centros Singulares da USC.

PROGRAMA DO IGFAE

Benvida ao IGFAE

• 10:00 Benvida do director do IGFAE, Carlos Salgado.
• 
  

Conferencias divulgativas

• 10:10 Astronomía de multimensaxeiros: explorando o universo alén da luz, Verónica Villa e Yago Lema.
• 12:00 O neutrino: a partícula elemental pantasma, Diego Costas e Lidia Carcedo.
• 16:00 O universo cuántico, Jose Edelstein.
• 18:00 Así funcionan os microscopios máis potentes do planeta, Iván Cambón e Alicia Muñoz.

Obradoiros infantís

• A física e a luz: creación de hologramas e demostración sobre a refracción da luz en diversos materiais.
• Electricidade e electrónica creativa: introdución á electricidade e o átomo, creación de pezas de papirotrónica.
• Einstein Rocket: videoxogo para experimentar a gravidade no espazo interestelar.

Obradoiros para maiores e demostracións

• As partículas invisibles que nos atravesan: como as detectamos?.
• Realidade virtual: observación de raios cósmicos.
• Xogando a ser partículas.
• Como funciona un ordenador cuántico?
• Visita ao Laboratorio Láser de Aceleración e Aplicacións (L2A2).
• Carta de núcleos en 3D construída con pezas LEGO.

In the Color Glass Condensate framework, the collision of two high-energy nuclei, which are densely packed with gluons, produces a colored plasma consisting of overoccupied gluon fields, named the Glasma. The Glasma fields describe the very early stage of ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions, as done at the LHC. We describe this gluonic plasma by means of classical Yang-Mills field equations and we solve them numerically using a real-time formulation of lattice QCD. A special class of probes, namely jets and heavy quarks, are formed early and experience the Glasma fields. It is common to study their properties in an equilibrated plasma or a hydrodynamic medium, by completely neglecting the initial stage. In this talk, I will discuss our recent work about realistic simulations of hard probes in the pre-equilibrium stage. For this purpose, we developed an efficient numerical solver for the classical transport of dynamical quarks and gluons in a Glasma background field, using the colored particle-in-cell method. Our results reveal that the effect on the momentum broadening and transport coefficients for both jets and heavy quarks is extremely pronounced. This observation holds irrespective of the fine particle initialisation details, such as formation time, mass and momentum. Additionally, we extract two-particle correlations of diquark pairs, which also turn out to be highly impacted by the Glasma stage. This talk is based on Phys. Rev. D 107, 114021.

Dana Avramescu is currently a doctoral student at the University of Jyväskylä, part of the Center of Excellence in Quark Matter. Supervised by Tuomas Lappi and Heikki Mäntysaari, her work is about the transport of hard probes in the Glasma pre-equilibrium stage. Previously, she studied at the University of Bucharest, and her master thesis involved coupling the Glasma stage to viscous hydrodynamics. Recent notable achievements include flash talks at Quark Matter and Initial Stages.

Representatives of PRISMA, the Association for Gender and Affective-Sexual Diversity in Science, Technology and Innovation are organising a participatory workshop at the IGFAE in which fundamental concepts are defined in order to frame the debate. The aim is not an exhaustive theoretical review, but rather to create a space for exchange to foster empathy and raise awareness of the need to combat discrimination at the individual level. The workshop includes a guided debate during the main part of the session, with a final space for additional questions from the audience, always with a pleasant and conciliatory approach.

In this seminar I will discuss how Exceptional field theory provides us with a natural framework to study AdS vacua and their CFT duals. I will start with a review of consistent truncations and their construction via ExFT, I will then describe two recent examples. In the first we constructed a new consistent truncation of type IIB supergravity on S^3xS^3xS^1. We then found several families of AdS3 vacua preserving various amounts of supersymmetry in 3 dimensions and uplifted the solutions to 10 d. In the second example we found a domain wall solution interpolating between the squashed and round S7 vacua of 11 d supergravity. We then used the machinery of KK spectrometry to compute the quadratic couplings of fluctuations along the flow. 

Xoves, 9 de novembro, Transfronteirizas, conversas de Arte e Ciencia, con Alan Sokal. (20h, IGFAE YouTube Channel).

Venres, 10 de novembro: presentación do Proxecto MEDRA.

Luns, 13 de novembro: Anuncio do Concurso de Comunicación Científica IGFAE C3.

Martes 14 de novembro: NerdNite. A Nave de Vidán.

Mércores, 15 de novembro: Conferencia de Krishna Rajagopal, profesor do MIT (20h, Auditorio Abanca): 50 years of quark freedom: from Big Bang soup to protons and back again.

Alan D. Sokal (Boston, 1955) é profesor de Matemáticas no University College London e profesor emérito de Física da Universidade de Nova York. Graduouse en Física en Harvard e realizou a súa tese de doutoramento en Princeton. Está especializado en disciplinas como a mecánica estatística ou a física computacional.

No ano 1996, protagonizou o coñecido como ‘Escándalo Sokal’, co que evidenciou a falta de rigor intelectual en algúns sectores da academia: redactou un artigo cheo de conceptos grandilocuentes, pero sen sentido, no que sostiña que a gravidade cuántica non é máis ca un constructo social e lingüístico. O artigo, titulado Transgredir as fronteiras: cara a unha hermenéutica transformadora da gravidade cuántica, foi publicado na revista Social Text, unha revista académica da Universidade de Duke, que trataba cuestións sociais e culturais. 

Ao mesmo tempo, Sokal preparou outro artigo no que revelaba o calote, afirmaba que o primeiro texto foi concibido como unha parodia e criticaba a algúns referentes das ciencias sociais e humanidades por deixar de lado o rigor e a razón en favor de prexuízos ideolóxicos. Sokal enviouno a Social Text, que rexeitou publicalo, polo que o texto acabou saíndo na revista Lingua Franca.

En 1997, Sokal publicou xunto a Jean Bricmont, físico belga, o libro Imposturas intelectuais, no que afondaba na súa idea, baseada en dúas cuestións relacionadas entre si: o uso pretencioso e temerario de conceptos científicos por parte dun grupo de filósofos e intelectuais influentes e, por outra banda, os problemas do relativismo cognitivo, que sostén que a ciencia moderna non é máis que un mito ou narrativa. Neste sentido, Sokal e Bricmont argumentaban que algúns dos referentes intelectuais da posmodernidade deturpaban conceptos da física e as matemáticas para reforzar as súas crenzas e discursos. 

O encontro poderá seguirse a través da canle de YouTube do IGFAE.